Vibrating Dramaturgy: Cara Berger @ Unfix 2015

What inspired this production: did you begin with an idea or a script or an object?
Cara Berger: Vibrati started with a conversation between my collaborator, Brianna Robertson-Kirkland, and me. We were thinking about how we might link our really quite different practices and research interests – Brianna is a classical singer and a voice historian, I am a practice-based researcher in contemporary theatre and critical theory – under the umbrella of performance and ecology. In this conversation we found that the term vibration seemed to be relevant to both of us. 

For Brianna it evoked the cultural history and practice of vibrato, a singing technique in which the pitch of a tone is made to fluctuate, while to me it opened up how vibration is a central metaphor in ecological thought: it is often used to speak about ways of touching or connecting, it relates to a kind of vibrancy that goes beyond the idea that we are completely self-sufficient, independent beings. As a term it asks us to take into account how we are enmeshed or interdependent with other forces, beings and environmental factors. 

So we started with a word and then undertook a research process into all the different things this term can mean in different contexts. This led us into all sorts of unanticipated places such as atom models that describe matter as vibrating movement rather than a solid substance or the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that has been traditionally sung with a lot of vibrato because the vibrating voice is often associated with shivering, entropic body – the energy expenditure of the body to keep itself alive that at the same time recalls the threat of death.

Why bring your work to Unfix?
We began the process with Unfix in mind from the outset – I have been interested in ecology and what performance can bring to this field for some time now, so Unfix seemed like the right place to try out some of the ideas that I have been mulling over. 

What is particularly attractive about the festival’s take on ecology is that it goes far beyond the idea that ecological art naïvely celebrates nature as a value in and for itself. Instead artists are asked to explore the fraught, complex and volatile interactions between what we call nature and what we call culture, to grapple with the distinction between the two and how we can’t simply locate ourselves in one or the other. 

It asks pretty fundamental questions about how we dwell in the world and how we can take action in it. For me this means working on a kind of mental or imaginary ecology – changing the way we perceive ourselves, as humans, in relation to things that surround us and moving away from the Western lineage of thought that sees the human as the ruler, guardian or shepherd of nature. Unfix is consequently a place to – humbly – try out how we might start to imagine ourselves differently.

What can the audience expect to see and feel - or even think - of your production?I’m always a bit wary of prescribing what an audience member might experience in a show. Vibrati is the outcome of a process of thinking and doing around the term vibration, and we are sharing some of the images and thoughts that came to us while working. 

What I hope to provide is a space for reflection, to create a segment of time in which the audience are stimulated sensorially and cerebrally in a way that may be meaningful to them at that point, be that emotionally through the atmosphere we create or philosophically through some of the ideas we are trying to bring up.

The Dramaturgy Questions

How would you explain the relevance - or otherwise - of dramaturgy within your work?
Dramaturgy is always a fundamental part of my working. For me a performance doesn't only become meaningful through what is shown, done and said on stage but also through the rhythm, pace and formal arrangement of its elements. For Vibrati this meant concretely that we spent a lot of time thinking about the dramaturgy of different vibratory elements of the stage: sound and light are essentially types of vibration at different frequencies, so we tried to make that tangible. 

We worked a lot on the dramaturgy of light for example. We use it very sparingly and precisely to bring its particular vibrancy to the forefront. Similarly, the dramaturgy of the human performer was important to us – there are many moments without live bodies on stage. Since we are talking about physical forces that act independently of human intervention it seemed logical to think about how we can make a show in which the performer is not always at the centre of attention.

What particular traditions and influences would you acknowledge on your work - have any particular artists, or genres inspired you and do you see yourself within their tradition?
I wouldn't say that any singular tradition or inheritance is mainly operative in the performance but we cite a number of different performance traditions, many of which we also are sceptical about. Brianna, for example, is trained in a tradition of the solo singer – which basically means she is trained in singing in vibrato – and we investigate some of the history of that tradition and how it has been thought about. 

British church choral singing and a lot of the ideology of purity and ethereality that surrounds it is all about minimising vibrato because it reminds us of the earthly body that shivers, vibrates and decays. We explicitly move against this tradition by foregrounding the physiology of the singing, and embracing both vibration and vibrato. 

At the same time the solo singer is quite an individualistic concept – we work against that by showing how the solo singer is not entirely in control and self-sufficient but dependent on her body’s movements, physical forces and other processes out of her control.

Do you have a particular process of making that you could describe - where it begins, how you develop it?
I often start with a term, an image or a cultural terrain – in this case vibrations – and work outwards from there. Making Vibrati included a lot of reading – about the cultural history of the singing voice, for instance, and how scientific findings impacted different arts practices in both Modernism and now. 

From the reading Brianna and I extracted images, texts or ideas that we wanted to explore in performance. We then tried out what kind of actions a text or image might inspire on stage, and later started stitching the material that seemed to click with us together. Much of the process of making this piece was about stripping back the material, simplifying it, until a really clear but dense stage action emerged. 

A lot of the ideas we are working with are quite complex, so we wanted to create a piece that gives the audience space to think and not overload them too much. It is more about inviting people in to join together the different ideas we have been working with than delivering an over-arching message or final statement. You could say that we followed the many vibrations that the word ‘vibration’ produces and are trying to create a space in which the audience might do the same.

Arches Live - Round One

The Arches Live! has become an annual gathering for artists - not just performers - with an interest in testing the boundaries. The first few days have seen a Minotaur stunble around, trapped in the basement; a young woman revisit her youthful failures; Prometheus and ancient creation myths envisioned through a feminist filter; a relationship stripped of romance and exposed as disfunctional and two friends test their boundaries.

Nothing fits easily into the notion of traditional theatre, and the diversity of styles - God Loves a Trier owes much to the comic experiments of Byrony Kimmings,  Minotaur/Monitor is classic Performance  Art with added mask, From Above Here echoes the performance installations that were a feature of the lamented National Review of Live Art - suggests a generation of young artists adapting a variety of traditions to their own, personal ends.

Fire into Song and Minotaur/Monitor, in different ways, return to classical mythologies and question their contemporary meaning. For Calum MacAskill, this means donning massive headpiece and shoving Pasiphae's shameful issue into a room beneath the railway station: the juxtaposition of a clinical analysis and the ancient story recasts the Minotaur as a victim of parental failure, bellowing in pain and more cripple than ancient archetype of horror. Meanwhile, Cara Berger retools a Graeco-Roman creation myth before cracking open the story of the divine being who gifted humanity fire.

Fire into Song is impressionistic - a first draft at rewriting the myths for an age after the ascent of feminist thought. The rigorous, intellectual approach is palliated by an elegant reading of Ovid and associated texts from the ancient world, and a symbolic dance to fragments of Prometheus' passion: the creation of the universe is mirrored by a clearing of the stage - a beautiful parallel to the work of the demiurge tidying  up the undifferentiated mess of chaos.

Roses are Dead is far easier to understand: a couple fight over the remains of their relationship. He is condemned as obsessive, deceitful and more in love with the idea of romance: she seems more conwith cerned blaming his self-love than engaging in the process of understanding. The vicious arguments that snake through the performance articulate the bitterness of romantic failure, but the image of love as a battlefield is only occasionally displaced to show the couple's emotional connection. Both characters come across as self-interested and complacent.

What all of these pieces share, alongside From Above Here which is structured around a long conversation about friendship between Stephanie Black and Abby Watson, is a presentation of youthful ideals and experiences. It's appropriate that much of the work feels unfinished,  hinting at further development: Arches Live! is designed to offer the opportunity for artists to sketch out new ideas. In these first performances, a  storehouse of strategies, philosophies and experiences is being constructed for future construction.

Fire Into Song

Show Name: Fire Into Song
Artist: Cara Berger with Victoria Beesley and Vanessa Coffey
Venue: Arches LIVE 2012
Date: Tue 18 - Wed 19 Sep 2012 | 8.15pm (1 hour) | Studio | £8/£6


Description (from Arches website): Drawing on a wealth of texts, from Ovid and Hesiod to Kafka and Helene Cixous, Fire Into Song shines a new light on the Prometheus myth by asking: can we imagine a female Prometheus?

Dance, spoken word and live improvisation combine to create a new and surprising performance each night as the main themes of the myth – the disintegration of the creative body, fire that brings life but also consumes it, and the creative act as one of self-destruction – are reexamined from a feminist perspective.

Gareth K Vile: Ah, the classics... Ovid, Hesoid: all full of fun, flair and casual misogyny. How does it feel making a piece that is explicit in its feminist intent yet working with some texts that, in my opinion, were there at the birth of the patriarchy?

Cara Berger: I completely agree. Ovid (whose work features in Ted Hughes’ translation) was writing at a time where women and the feminine were being increasingly written out of myths. In fact, I would go as far as saying that the Prometheus myth, as a myth of origin, plays a pivotal role in this since it succeeds in ignoring women and their bodies in the process of creation. 

Such texts feature in the production as I am interested in working in the context of shared narrative and imaginary fabric and doing work on it. This means that one can’t just leave the old stories behind (and the Prometheus myth is a very persistent one that carries over into Christianity for instance) but instead I try to work on transforming them. For such a project myth, which is transformative by nature and calls to be re-written is very appealing.

The female Prometheus... reminds me of The Modern Prometheus, which was written by a woman... is the idea of female creativity not so much a problem of innate ability but transmission?

Yes transmission has been a great problem, women have of course always been creative but often their work has been seen as minor and hence wasn’t entered into the canon. However I also think that women are discouraged, when they create, to think about what it is to be a woman (in the many different ways one can be “woman”) and to create from that point of view. 

This, I think, links back to the idea of female creativity being minor, the belief that what deals with women, the female and the feminine is in some way less general or abstract and in effect less meaningful. It is also about recognising that much culture is produced from a perspective of male experience and that this sexual difference is inscribed in artworks. Art is never sexually neutral, even if we might believe this at first and when an artwork is not specifically concerned with gender and sexuality. It is always inscribed with desire.

Over the Fringe, I spoke to a young of young artists who would be doing things like "reconstructing gender roles" but denied that this was feminism. It was then I realised how old I was -  I have no way of making a distinction between the two concepts. Why do you think that some artists fight shy of being called feminists?

I have a hard time understanding such statements too. It seems that some artists are worried, they might be perceived to be “single-issue” driven – a perspective that I think denies the profundity of gendered and sexed experience as it saturates all other experiences (just as class or culture or race do too) and cannot be reduced to specific moments where these “roles” appear. 

But more importantly, the term feminism got a dirty name somewhere in the late eighties and began to be seen as old-fashioned, proscriptive and joyless – the opposite of what may feminist theorists and practitioners. Cixous in particular, actually advocate!

I have however been noticing a movement towards embracing the term “feminist” again amongst young people across the gender spectrum. That said, a lot still needs be done by young feminists to clarify their position especially in relation to earlier activism and thought.

 I draw on Cixous who started writing in the sixties and sometimes I do find it terrifying how true her writings from the sixties and seventies still ring. I have never been able to get to terms with the idea of “postfeminism” I’m not really sure what it is although I’ve read plenty of it. It mostly seems to be a way to say feminism without using the “dirty word “ itself…

I find Helene Cisoux really hard.... can you give me a quick run down of why you have picked her work?

I find Cixous work appealing as an artist, since it is a call to creativity. It is not just a critical apparatus but it demands direct application to art production. Cixous herself has written dozens of books and a number of plays, many of which have been translated from French but this tends to be largely unknown in Britain.

Her work is founded on Freud, and his deconstructor Lacan. So she believes that sexuality and desire is inscribed in our fantasies, our dreams and the art we make. But it also goes beyond this and impacts on the way we interact with others, the way we govern and the whole political scene. Desire is political and ethical.

She also believes that there is such a thing as masculine desire and feminine desire and that these are not bound to men and women – so a man can be feminine and a woman masculine, and this can change from moment to moment. In her analytical work she looks at how these two “economies” play out in different works of art and shows how the masculine has been privileged throughout Western culture. The masculine she understands to be ordering, conserving and unifying while the feminine resists closure, it is excessive, tactile, musical and riskful, it celebrates difference and multiplicity rather than sameness.

Oh, hang on, I've got stuck in the theory.... can you tell me how you translate the ideas into a theatrical experience?

We have worked a lot on giving up control over meaning so it becomes contingent and the materiality of the theatre can take hold, so theater can become tactile and voiced. To do this we have created a “poetry generator” which was developed by Calum Rodger and coded by Sebastian Charles. We’ve fed 16 basic sentences (from a novel by Cixous called The Book of Promethea) into it and it now creates endless new combinations. 

This generator is the basis for a large improvisation piece in which we combine dance, words, voice and sound that will be different every time it is performed. What we’re aiming at is excessive meaning and sensory impact rather than presenting a nicely ordered myth that can explain and encompass everything and everyone.

We are also thinking through the relationship with the audience and how the audience can be implied in an exchange. How them being in a room with us, with their own creative potential, their own desires and images can somehow be drawn on, without being put on the spot.